Benchmarking

Put simply: Benchmarking is the most efficient way to measure your company’s performance against best practices that lead to superior performance. Data from your company is compared against similar data from market leaders. The gaps show both your greatest competitive strengths and your highest priority challenges.

In a perfect world, every business decision would be backed by data that provides:

Benchmarking is the First Step in Adopting (or Exceeding) Best Practices.

The OnTarget Baseline

Acumen Partners’ OnTarget Baseline is a proprietary benchmarking technology that combines the benefits of top internal and external evaluation practices to create a single comprehensive report. The OT Baseline uses the Business Impact Model to examine key aspects of your competitive advantage (Right Things), your approach to organizational excellence (Right Way), and how best to leverage your team’s unique approach to problem-solving and action (Right Team).

Most importantly, the OnTarget Baseline:

identifies and prioritizes actions you can take to increase your productivity and competitive position

provides clear organizational and departmental benchmarks to guide executive and team discussions

FAQs About the ONTARGET Baseline and Benchmarking

The OnTarget Baseline combines best practices from leading Internal and External benchmarking practices. All scores are normalized for easy comparison across categories and provided in both data and visualization based contexts. Bottom line: OnTarget Baselines are easy to read, share and put into action.

Acumen curates and maintains a proprietary dataset drawing upon numerous commercially and privately available sources. Our OnTarget™ Baseline and associated data tools utilize proprietary algorithms and resources groomed over 20+ years. Finding data sources to do your own benchmarking is not difficult in this digital era. The challenge is utilizing that data to achieve readily actionable insights—and this is where Acumen Partners stands apart from other providers.

Absolutely! Every company should be benchmarking—Period. With or without a partner, benchmarking should be an integral activity in all of your strategic and tactical planning. Utilizing a firm that specializes in data and benchmarking, like Acumen Partners, allows you to focus all of your resources on advancing your business vs. keeping up with advances and changes in data management practices.

Yes. As a general rule, the OnTarget Baseline is appropriately administered to a full company or a single department. The one exception to this may be your company’s revenue/sales team. Because of the unique expectations sales teams work under, we offer a specialized OnTarget Baseline: Revenue that is expressly designed to provide unique insights into this critical business function.

The first benchmarking effort is commonly referred to as the “Baseline” against which all future benchmarking efforts will be compared. An organizational (or departmental) baseline should be re-established on an annual basis. This ensures that all comparisons made throughout the year always reflect the most recent changes to the market and to your company. That said, the terms are often used interchangeably.

No. Never. Confidentiality is a fundamental ethical tenet at Acumen Partners. All information transferred, gathered or generated over the course of our client work is held in the strictest confidence. Information is compartmentalized to your engagement team and anonymized within our tools and systems.

Great Question! The Micro-Baselines (one for full organizations and one for revenue/sales teams) are true, live, baselines that demonstrate the value of benchmarking and even generate actionable outcomes. The outcomes can be directly transferred to the OnTarget Productivity Plan which we also offer for free.

So, where is the catch? We provide these live micro-baselines as an incentive to invest in the much deeper and broader full OnTarget Baseline products. The primary differences between the free options and the full products are:

Micro-Baselines are limited to input from a maximum of three people vs. unrestricted team size with the full Products

Micro-Baselines touch on each critical business function but lack the complete scope and depth covered by the Full Products; and

Micro-Baselines provide some insights but lack and the depth of analysis provided by the Full Products;

We are a data-driven consultancy. We are always looking for and investing in ways to keep our data current, accessible and relevant. In the end, the final proof is the success our clients achieve as it is applied in their companies.